They sent a confirmation mail saying that "I am in" as soon as I cancelled their subscription! Pretty lame they can't identify difference between an entry event and an exit event
MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
71–80 of 108 posts
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#72In the end a service like MoviePass will be needed, noone wants one just tied to one theater chain most likely though it will be that way for a while if not indefinitely. It looks like this iteration of a movie service independent of movie theaters just won't be it. As it has been said, theaters are empty much of the time and they make major margins from their concessions. You'd think more of them would have gone for…
> noone wants one just tied to one theater chain most likely though it will be that way for a while if not indefinitely
I'd take a single location to be honest. I'd say > 90% of my movie going in the past 5 yrs has been the same location. For the edge cases I can pay cash.
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#73I think MoviePass has been successful in showing that the industry needs a shakeup. I dont know what their monetization model was, I dont think they knew what it was.
But every industry can be shaken up if you're willing to give things away effectively for free with VC money. I don't know if that translates to proving an industry needs a shakeup.
MPs data would kind of help show the supply curve for movies. Something like @Free user X would watch N movies per month. It's an interesting thing because Theaters may consider making movies free, but charging 2x for food...
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#74Damn. Been rooting for them. Theaters are practically vacant most of the time, so I'd think it would be a win-win. But the chains can't stomach sharing the power. Sounds like Movie Pass is all but done at this point.
A long time ago I heard of a demo of a telco project in a mall's cinema. They sent a location based SMS to everyone in the mall giving away half price tickets to an otherwise empty screening starting in 15mins. And apparently it filled up. However that was years ago and I don't think anything came of it. Ive always imagined there was some business rationale for the cinema to keep the ticket pricing static and just ta…
A buddy of mine similarly did digital signage for a mall in central Japan. The most important sign just aggregated Twitter accounts controlled by employees of the retail shops. By far the most successful emergent behavior: "Do you cut hair for a living? Do you not have someone's hair to cut in next 30 minutes? Tweet that the next person to walk in gets 10% off their haircut and it will show up on a sign that a hundred people pass every five minutes."
(I suspect that many people who cut hair in Japan do so on the US model, where they are independent contractors of the shop who "rent a chair" as opposed to salaried employees. It is to their direct advantage to maximize throughput, in a way that it is not to the direct advantage of e.g. someone who works at McDonalds to maximize sales of burgers.)
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of customers probably don't mind, but the moment they will mind is when they want to see a movie that is sold out at one of their common theaters and go to another theater not in the same chain. With AMC Stubs A+, you buy the ticket in advance from the app (something you couldn’t do with movie pass). You would know if a movie is sold out. Some of the AMCs have reserved seating where you can choose your seat in…
Yeah, those are nice features, but I was mainly talking about when you check the app or buy the tickets ahead and it is sold out or doesn't have ideal reserved seating left, from there if you want to see it now you have to pay full price without the movie benefit at another chain. This can happen especially on opening nights. We always book our tickets online ahead of time and only go to reserved seating theaters wit…
Edit: https://www.sinemia.com/ looks like it supports all theaters and will probably pick up the MoviePass customers who want independent from the theater chain subscription movies.
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#76MoviePass (incorrectly) assumed it would be able to strike sweetheart deals with all theater chains, thus drastically reducing overall costs. It even sounds good in theory - why wouldn't the theater want to get paid for seats that would have otherwise gone empty and have more people inside buying concessions? It could even have worked - maybe five or ten years ago. Now the theaters themselves quickly realized the val…
Problem is, it's nigh impossible for a tech company to "strike deals with all the theater chains," be they sweetheart or not so sweet. The movie theater biz is one of the most inept around, stuck in the 1950's in terms of its business model. I did a tech startup that tried to bring social/mobile/local tech to the movie theater experience, and the theaters balked. They fear technology. It took a decade of fearmongerin…
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Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#77MoviePass (incorrectly) assumed it would be able to strike sweetheart deals with all theater chains, thus drastically reducing overall costs. It even sounds good in theory - why wouldn't the theater want to get paid for seats that would have otherwise gone empty and have more people inside buying concessions? It could even have worked - maybe five or ten years ago. Now the theaters themselves quickly realized the val…
Nope it would not have worked. You see movie theater owners have to pay the movie owner a per viewer fee. So it is not merely about filling up empty seats. The entire "filling up empty seats" story relies on the misconception that if you have empty seats there is a zero marginal cost to extra viewers, but that is not the case, movie owners charge per ticket sold.
The deal movie pass offered theaters was "if you make a deal with us, we can help you raise revenues at a marginal loss." No sane business person wants that. The point of business is to make money not lose it.
Moviepass was always a crazy impossible scheme. The business model was: get famous, get high growth, then we'll figure something out. This is something we rational people do not like to think about, but there are people out there that take bold and reckless actions without thinking much or at all about the consequences, under a belief that it will all work out in the end. You can just look at the political news to confirm that.
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is, it's nigh impossible for a tech company to "strike deals with all the theater chains," be they sweetheart or not so sweet. The movie theater biz is one of the most inept around, stuck in the 1950's in terms of its business model. I did a tech startup that tried to bring social/mobile/local tech to the movie theater experience, and the theaters balked. They fear technology. It took a decade of fearmongerin…
That isn't always true - e.g. Fandango was able to find success even when theaters wanted nothing to do with the internet, until all of them were forced to partner with it or risk being left out.
But Fandango makes its money directly from the user, in fees.
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#79MoviePass (incorrectly) assumed it would be able to strike sweetheart deals with all theater chains, thus drastically reducing overall costs. It even sounds good in theory - why wouldn't the theater want to get paid for seats that would have otherwise gone empty and have more people inside buying concessions? It could even have worked - maybe five or ten years ago. Now the theaters themselves quickly realized the val…
Problem is, it's nigh impossible for a tech company to "strike deals with all the theater chains," be they sweetheart or not so sweet. The movie theater biz is one of the most inept around, stuck in the 1950's in terms of its business model. I did a tech startup that tried to bring social/mobile/local tech to the movie theater experience, and the theaters balked. They fear technology. It took a decade of fearmongerin…
Let me raise another hypothesis. The real value that movie theaters have today is their ability to shape taste and choose winners. Of course, they don't and can't control tastes completely but they can strongly shape them by determining what's put in front of people.
Some mainstream movies are good, some are bad. Some alternative movies are good, some are bad. But for overall movies production and profiting process, the movies that make the most money have spin-offs, have predictable sequels, have merchandise, can be sold to middle-class third world people who aspire to American or European lifestyles and so-forth. These make the most profits.
So movie theaters help the industry by putting more movies with this extra profit potential in front of people. How exactly they get compensated for this is I couldn't answer in detail but ownership of the largest chains is very incestuous.
But this model requires a situation people first to go to a movie and later to decide which movie.
So this would give the result. It's bad to movie goers power to decide to see. It's bad even if that means more movie theater revenue.
Re: MoviePass Owner Sued by Shareholders as Business Model Falters
#80MoviePass (incorrectly) assumed it would be able to strike sweetheart deals with all theater chains, thus drastically reducing overall costs. It even sounds good in theory - why wouldn't the theater want to get paid for seats that would have otherwise gone empty and have more people inside buying concessions? It could even have worked - maybe five or ten years ago. Now the theaters themselves quickly realized the val…
Problem is, it's nigh impossible for a tech company to "strike deals with all the theater chains," be they sweetheart or not so sweet. The movie theater biz is one of the most inept around, stuck in the 1950's in terms of its business model. I did a tech startup that tried to bring social/mobile/local tech to the movie theater experience, and the theaters balked. They fear technology. It took a decade of fearmongerin…
Any chance the theaters were being rational and it was in fact you who were mistaken? The idea of an app that makes people watch more movies does seem pretty far fetched the way you describe it.
A more logical conclusion would be that you either didn't sell your thing to them very well (as you haven't sold it to us) or that they, being in the movie business, saw something about it that you, being in the app business, didn't.